Obamacare website will hit today's deadline, officials say

Saturday

Nov 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMNov 30, 2013 at 10:57 AM

WASHINGTON - Administration officials are preparing to announce on Sunday that they have met today's deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site's ability to handle 50,000 users at once.

WASHINGTON — Administration officials are preparing to announce on Sunday that they have met today’s deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site’s ability to handle 50,000 users at once.

However, they have yet to meet all their internal goals for repairing the federal health-care site, and it will not become clear how many consumers the website can accommodate until more people try to use it.

As of last night, federal officials and contractors had achieved two goals, according to government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity: They had increased the system’s capacity and reduced errors. On the other hand, the site’s pages do not load as fast as they want, officials said, and they are working to ensure that large numbers of consumers can enter the site.

An official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the federal health-insurance exchange, said the site’s true capacity is unclear: Officials need to see how it performs under “weekday traffic volumes” when demand is at its peak.

Federal employees and IT contractors continued to work overnight to try to reach one of the remaining targets: how many people per hour should be able to register and log onto the site. An earlier attempt to make the fix failed several days ago.

Originally, Nov. 30 was not intended to be a key date for the online-enrollment system, but it took on outsized political and public importance when administration officials announced five weeks ago that the “vast majority of users” would be able to sign up for insurance through the site by that day.

Federal employees, outside contractors and a handful of technical and management experts have worked at breakneck speed for five weeks to improve the website’s performance as the White House has come under withering criticism from its political opponents and some consumers.

In an interview with Barbara Walters that aired last night on ABC, President Barack Obama said he was confident that, in time, Americans would come to embrace his controversial health-care law.

“I continue to believe, and I am absolutely convinced, that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama said. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”

Administration officials have said for several weeks that they define success as having “the vast majority of users” be able to navigate the site and sign up for insurance. While they initially did not define what that meant, White House press secretary Jay Carney said earlier this month that the administration’s aim was to have 80 percent of users enroll through the site. Those working on the project have set speed and error rates as a way of measuring that goal.

A significant upgrade in the website’s capacity was carried out early this week, according to the government officials, which allowed HealthCare.gov to accommodate more people at once without causing the site to malfunction. For instance, many more consumers can simultaneously be on a section of the site designed to let people compare available health plans.

Even so, how much load the site can withstand depends on how much consumers are asking it to do. For example, simply looking around on the “learn” part of the site — where people can get basic information and a rough sense of prices — puts less strain on the system than the areas where people actually apply for coverage.

The upgrade that workers were attempting last night is intended to allow more people to use the initial stages of seeking insurance on the site. But the upgrade also meant that the site would be unavailable overnight until 8 a.m. today.

The blitz to rehabilitate the site has entailed an unusual public and private partnership over the past five weeks. The White House rejected the idea of turning over the work of fixing the site mainly to Silicon Valley allies, some of whom served as the president’s campaign operatives, deciding instead to selectively tap a handful of them to help steer the project.

Jeffrey Zients, the former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget who was designated by the White House in late October to oversee the project, told reporters during a briefing this week the administration “brought in a fresh set of eyes” the week of Oct. 21 to examine the system. He said that survey concluded within a few days that the website could be fixed and that it did not need to be thrown out and a new one installed — but that the fix would require “ additional talent and expertise” and a different way of approaching the site’s defects.

Since starting work, the team has “knocked through well over 300 bugs,” Zients said, and each evening the group has either put in hardware upgrades or fixed a glitch during the four- to five-hour maintenance window it has to work on the site.

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